Final Bow
by El Pepe
Summary: Two years after becoming the head reaper for the External Influences division, George gets a Post-it of a former peer with an unusual ETD. Mentions of George/Mason. Post-movie. Language, nothing that wasn't in the series. Rated "M" for a couple of "questionable" references. Oneshot.


**Final Bow**

A

Dead Like Me

Oneshot

I looked down at the post-in in my hand, wondering if this would be a tough reap or not. On the one hand, it wasn't like I really knew the person. It wasn't like I was reaping Reggie or my parents. Sure, I went to school with him back in the days when I was Georgia Lass. Sure, everyone said the slightly pudgy boy had a crush on me. And then there was the whole fiasco involving homecoming, and senior prom. Not that it really bothered me, and let's be honest, I probably would have tuned him down anyways. Kinda hard to not go to homecoming or prom when you have a date.

On the other hand, though, he was always nice to me. Kind of like Mason, in a way. It led me to think that maybe this crush he had was something a little more in-depth. Again, kind of like Mason.

On the other other hand, I also reaped his family two years ago, ironically the second-to-last assignment Rube had given me before moving on. With his death being in his home, I was starting to become afraid that this would be something more like a suicide. I still remember that he took a lot of shit in school for his weight, his lack of social life, and people saying he was a virgin.

And finally, on the other other other hand, there was the problem with his ETD on the post-it. Normally, someone's ETD looks like a standard time. The one on this post-it was different. Despite having been the group leader for two years, I asked the others if they knew what the thing meant. I first asked Mason, since he was in bed with me when the list was delivered. He had no idea what it meant, and started to become afraid that it somehow meant it was my last post-it. Roxy and Daisy were just as clueless as to what it meant.

My eyes move back to the 3:30pm-4:00pm for D. Wolf's ETD. I lift up my other hand, seeing it's now 3:28pm. With a sigh, I walk forward and knock on the door. I stood there for a moment, hoping he wasn't going to strangle himself when the door opened, and I had to stifle my gasp of shock.

When I saw him at the funeral, he was still a large guy. Sure, he looked like he grew into it, but there was still no denying that he was overweight, if not just downright fat. Now, he thin, and not in a good way. You could tell he had skin sagging along his waist. His eyes look sunken, and his face was almost skeletal. He had needle marks along his arms, and what appeared to be a permanent five-o'clock shadow on his face.

"Yeah?" he asked, his voice shot and broken. I almost cried.

"Are you David Wolf?" I asked, almost praying he would give me another name that started with the letter D. That maybe this thing standing before wasn't the sweet boy I had gone to school with.

"Yeah, what of it?" he asked.

"My name's Millie Hagen." I said, still trying to keep my emotions in check. It shouldn't be this hard. I mean, it's not like I actually dated the guy back in high school. Sure, I guess he was sort of cute, in a way. And maybe it did feel nice sometimes to have someone that sort of liked you. But I never really felt anything for him.

Did I?

"And?" he asked sarcastically.

"Um...I'm with a Christian music group. You're being invited to play violin on a concert tour." I said, remembering he had once claimed disappointment that he turned down a chance to play violin on some Christian tour group thing. Sometimes, knowing the dead really helped, at least when it comes to gaining their attention.

"Really?" he said coldly. Despite being dead, it even sent a shiver down my spine.

"Yeah." I said, giving him what I hoped passed for a reassuring smile, something I finally mastered, picked up from Betty a few years after she piggy-backed with an Irishman.

"Well, you're about seven years to late for the violin part, and two years to late for the Christian part." he said, stepping back. Before I could open my mouth, he slammed the door in my face. I was shocked. I couldn't place the boy I once knew with the thing that claimed to be him. I sighed and looked down at my watch, seeing it was already after 3:30pm. I dropped my head, letting out a sigh. I hadn't missed a reap in almost four years.

With an ease that comes from being with Mason, I reach for my lockpicks and open the door. Picking locks, another trick of the trade that comes for reapers, including stealing cars ("The term, Georgie-girl, is _boosting_."), swindling the living, and leaving for your reap before the other person to make them pay for your breakfast at the newly rebuilt Der Waffle Haus.

Yes, we reapers live it large.

I close the door to the house and turn around, sadly unsurprised to see it look so empty. There were no photos on the wall, no guitars or basses lying around, no expensive sound or computer equipment. Just a dead man sitting on a sofa with a shotgun on a table in front of him.

Except I didn't reap his soul yet.

"Um, David." I said, hoping to get his attention. He looked up quickly, and grabbed the shotgun in front of him. He cocked it, loading a shell into the breach.

"The fuck's your problem!?" he yelled as he stood up, shouldering the shotgun, getting me to gulp. I knew that nothing could kill me, or at least a gunshot wouldn't, but that didn't mean getting shot with a shotgun was on my list of things to do today.

For some reason, I started thinking about Mason's story of what he thought was his last reap. How he simply told the person that he was a grim reaper. How he showed the person his post-it. In some ways, that ended up being what killed the man. Mason told me once, one night after what he so calmly dubbed "wild hot monkey sex" that he wondered if the man would have lived had he not shown him the post-it.

I'm starting to understand why he said that. Even though I can see the evidence of David's self-destructive tendencies, I'm beginning to wonder if he would have lived had I simply walked away. If I had simply walked away from the house after he slammed the door in my face, or if I had simply never shown up, would D. Wolf have simply gone on living, missed his appointment with death.

And yet, as he stands here with shotgun aimed at my head, I can't help but feel that he isn't living. His eyes have a deep-seated pain in them. Years later, long after my dear sweet Mason, my best friend and sister in Daisy, and the mother-figure in Roxy all got their lights, I understand why I did it. But for the here and now, the decision seems wrong. That I've crossed the line of simple "I take your souls to save your from pain" to cold-blooded murder.

"Do you remember Georgia Lass?" I asked, my eyes flicking to the clock he has in his living room. It's the only thing I've seen on a wall so far, and it reads 3:34pm.

"Of course I remember her." he says quickly, as if it hurts him to remember me.

"I'm...Georgia Lass." I say. He lowers the shotgun, looking at me with a look that I remember someone giving me once. My mother gave me the same look after I tried to convince her I was me. I had forgotten memories as punishment. I can only hope that doesn't happen now.

"Bullshit." he says after a moment, raising the shotgun back up. I can see that didn't work.

"Look." I say, reaching into my pocket. I pull out the post-it and hand it out. "Seven years ago, I was hit by a toilet-seat from the Russian space station. I had my soul reaped before it happened so I wouldn't feel any pain, and the person who reaped me got his lights, and moved on. Ever since, I have been stuck here as a grim reaper."

Well, so far, I remember everything. Then again, maybe the fuckers in upper management decide that my remembering I'm "Toilet-seat Girl" is punishment enough.

"Really." he says again, just as coldly.

"Everyday, a master list of everyone who will die in the area is given to the head reaper in charge of each group." I say, my eyes moving to the clock again, seeing three minutes have passed. "The names that are for the reaper's group are highlighted. The reaper then writes down the limited information needed for each individual reaper."

"Really."

"Two years ago, I was named the head reaper for the external influences. And this morning, your name was on the list." I tell him, shaking the post-it. He walks forward slowly and reached out with his left hand, his right hand still holding the shotgun pulled tight against his shoulder. He takes the post-it and steps back before looking down at it.

"Estimated Time of Death...3:30pm to 4:00pm?" he ask, looking up the clock for a split second before turning back to me. "What the fuck does that mean?"

"I don't know." I answer, assuming he's confused about the thirty-minute window. I figure if he got "Estimated Time of Death" from "ETD" than it was the only thing that could be confusing about it. "Normally, the paperwork the head reaper gets gives us your full name, address, time of death, forms of identification, age, date of birth, date of death, cause of death, and last thought."

"Wait, last thought?" he ask, lowering the shotgun a bit. It's no longer aimed at my head, but still at center mass. So if he pulls the trigger, my head won't blow up. I'll just have ground hamburger for breast for a day. I don't think Mason would like that very much. "If this is true, what was my last thought? Or what will be?"

"At least I'm not dying alone." I say, trying to keep my voice steady. I won't admit that I felt a few tears fall when I first saw that. I won't admit that my heart broke slightly upon seeing those words.

Something in how I say it, or maybe the words, finally seem to convince him. He lowers the gun, his expression blank. For being told he's going to die sometime within the next twenty minutes, he seems fairly calm. He carries the look of someone who has accepted death. It's a look that I don't see so often on people. Usually, kids and the elderly have little trouble accepting their death. Teenagers into the mid-twenties have the hardest time accepting their deaths. But outside a small handful of cases, no one has looked as calm as David.

"You sure don't look like Georgie." he says, getting my attention to go back fully to him.

"That's because the living see me as Millie Hagen." I tell him. He nods his head, as if he suspected as much. "Kinda hard to have a dead girl walking around her own city looking like herself.

"True." he says simply. "So what now?"

"Now...I take your soul, and then you die."

"And how will I die?"

"I don't know." I say simply. "Along with the fucked up ETD, the cause of death was left blank."

"How you do this?" he ask, again sounding calm. I simply step forward and brush my hand down his right arm. Instead of looking down at his arm like most do, he looks down at his left wrist. He holds up his arm and continues to look at it, getting me to worry it's going to be heart attack. Maybe the shock of being reaped is the external influence.

Georgia, my dear, you really have crossed the line into murderer.

"My wrist doesn't hurt." he says, sounding shocked. He flexes his wrist a bit before looking back up at me. "What are you?"

"I'm a grim reaper." I say again. "I take your souls before you die so you don't feel pain."

"You like Stairway to Heaven?" he ask, completely out of the blue. I look at him for a moment, trying to figure out how this came to be.

"Uh...yeah, it's a nice song." I reply. "My boyfriend slash fellow reaper got me into all the British rock music."

He nods his head and puts the gun down. He cocks his head for me to follow him and walks out of the room and into a hallway. I shrug and follow him, knowing I need to stay with him. He walks to a door and pulls out a key from his pocket. For a moment, I'm afraid he has people locked up, some type of sex slave, rather consensual or not. He slides the key into the door and unlocks it before turning to me.

"A long time ago, I once played seven instruments." he says, staring into my eyes. Though still sunken, they had a light I hadn't seen in them when he first opened his door. "I played bass, guitar, piano, violin, drums, and the autoharp."

"Quite the collection." I say, knowing he played the first four.

"I hurt my wrist one day, about seven months after Georgia died." he continued. "I never played again. Even the bass, one of the easiest instruments on your wrist, hurt to much to play." he finished before opening the door and walking inside. As he walked inside, a stupid ("cock-sucking" as Rube would often say) graveling ran out of the room. I followed him, wishing I could take the past fifteen minutes back.

He walks over to a black violin case and opens it. With an almost natural flourish, he take it out of the case and removes the dust cover in one fluid motion. He holds it up and starts to tune it. I open my mouth to warn him, to tell him that the stupid fucking cock-sucking graveling had probably tampered with it, that if he played it, he would die. Yet, nothing comes out. Leave it to the fuckers in middle-management to hold my tongue now.

Slowly, he started to play the hauntingly familiar opening. The irony wasn't lost on me. He was going to die any minute now, and he's playing Stairway to Heaven. Having seen a lot of light shows in the past seven years, I've yet to see a single stairway leading up. I've seen a lot of things, including a few highways to Hell, all of which were identical. They seemed reserved for rapist, murders, lawyers, and politicians, but never a stairway.

I noticed tears falling from his eyes as he played. Usually, I would bet they would be from the fear of dying, but this time, I'm not so sure. Usually, when someone dies, they want to do something one last time. Say goodbye to their families, have sex one last time, eat a meal again, drive, anything. It hit me that I was giving David that chance. The tears weren't of sadness, or fear, but of relief. He was getting to do something again that he loved, even if it was for one last time.

In some strange way, it helped me feel less like a murderer. I have no doubt now that if I had simply walked away from his house, he would still be alive tomorrow. And yet, he wasn't really alive. These few minutes since he picked up the violin, they were most alive he's been since I saw him at the funeral. What I'm doing isn't murderer. Murderer means that the person was alive and you ended their life. You stopped them from living. I'm not stopping him from living.

I'm letting him live one more time.

As he plays the last note, the fourth string snaps, slicing his throat. Blood sprays and he falls to the ground. His body, already dead but just not knowing it, gasp for breath. I knell down next to him, remembering what the paper said his last thought was. Though I knew it would destroy the clothes I'm wearing, I lift up his torso and put his head on my lap. Our eyes meet as he continues his death spasms, and he grows calm. After a moment, he stops moving, and his eyes grow unfocused.

From the living room, the clock rings four o'clock in the afternoon.

"George?" I hears him say behind me. I turns to look at him, tears in my eyes.

"If I hadn't come here, you would still be alive." I say, unable to deny it.

"I know." he replies. "I knew that the moment you touched my arm. Knew that the moment I picked up the violin. But I don't blame you." he says, looking down at his dead body. "If anything, you set me free."

I noticed lights start to form behind him. We both looked and noticed it was a little island cove. Down the beach were two lounge chairs. A woman was on one of them, looking to be beautiful in her own rights without the definition of beauty that the world saw. A guitar was in the other one, clearly waiting for it's owner to walk into the lights and play for the beautiful girl in the chair next to it.

"That boyfriend of yours, does he the albums or CDs or digital or something?"

"CDs and a few albums." I reply.

"There are a ton of albums from the sixties and seventies in here. Take whatever you want." he said, walking into the lights. He stops, one last time to turn and look at me. I give him a smile, and he bows to me, in a traditional musician's bow. He smiles sadly, then turns to walk fully into the lights.

It may not have been a stairway to heaven, but at least he didn't die alone.


End file.
